"Look at This F*cking Hipster" By Joe Mande

“Look at This F*cking Hipster” by Joe Mande is a small, square book for your coffee table full of questionable photographs of the hipster species. Joe Mande is not a hipster-hater, but does specify that “Look at This F*cking Hipster” is a book originating from his blog whose entire purpose is to ridicule hipsters. I don’t usually say this, but at first glance, I believe that the book seems better than the blog.

He defines a hipster in the first chapter through an exaggerated example of a friend who transformed from a typically cool Atkins-diet college student into a Vegan hipster. Joe Mande lists the causes for hipsterdome (my word, not his) as “loneliness, a fear of maturity, and/or emotional trauma” and states that the first sign is often the person pretending to have read “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. As of yet, the DSM’s list of psychological disorders does not include being a hipster, but it may well be on its way.

As Seattle has a disproportionate number of hipsters, I was eager to check out the pictures, which are all neatly captioned on each page. The book is divided into different sections including a section entitled, “Is this a hipster?”, “They’re just like us.”, “Celebrity Hipsters”, and “Hipsters through the ages.” Unfortunately, the captions fail to live up to the pictures themselves, which seem to have been selected with the utmost of care and actually represent a good part of the hipster culture.

The ultimate hipster in “Look at This F*cking Hipster” is no less than Jesus Christ himself who the writer believes would be, “in the Peace Corps turning water into sparks” if he was alive today. (It might be more useful if he were turning sparks into water, but I’ll let that pass.) I would have to give an honorary mention for hipster status to Che Guevara who Joe Mande believes would be a supporter of Ralph Nader’s next campaign for president. Personally, I’d like to think that Che would be a lot more influential than just a typical Nader supporter, but again, the captions in the book are not the strong point.

Many of the run-of-the-mill hipsters pictured are wearing extremely large glasses, which reminded me of David Letterman’s old sketch, “What’s the deal with old guys and Giant Glasses?”, which in all actuality, was probably the inspiration for the hipsters to wear ginormous glasses in the first place.